Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Started it today. Read it for that 20th century fiction class in college, and haven’t really thought about it much since then. The format is difficult—the foreword, the poem, and the commentary—I get the sense that the characters are hiding somewhere beneath them and it’s up to me to find the clues to draw them out. So far, at least, Shade seems a lot more likeable than Kinbote, but maybe that’ll change. I’m only three pages or so into the commentary, but I already get the sense that it and his foreword is more about Kinbote than they are about Shade or Shade’s poem. I liked the poem—at least the parts that read like prose. Other times I had no idea what was being said—almost like it was written in French. Shade’s daughter gave me a snippet of a story idea—people who don’t fit in and the sad and lonely lives they lead.

She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend:Nature chose me so as to wrench and rendYour heart and mine. At first we’d smile and say:“All little girls are plump” or “Jim McVey(The family oculist) will cure that slightSquint in no time.” And later: “She’ll be quitePretty, you know”; and, trying to assuageThe swelling torment: “That’s the awkward age.”“She should take riding lessons,” you would say(Your eyes and mine not meeting). “She should playTennis, or badminton. Less starch, more fruit!She may not be a beauty, but she’s cute.”

It was no use, no use. The prizes wonIn French and history, no doubt, were fun;At Christmas parties games were rough; no doubt,And one shy little guest might be left out;But let’s be fair: while children of her ageWere cast as elves and fairies on the stageThat she’d helped paint for the school pantomime,My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom,And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room.

Another winter was scrape-scooped away.The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May.Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned.Alas, the dingy cygnet never turnedInto a wood duck. And again your voice:“But this is prejudice! You should rejoiceThat she is innocent. Why overstressThe physical? She wants to look a mess.Virgins have written some resplendent books.Lovemaking is not everything. Good looksAre not that indispensable!” And stillOld Pan would call from every painted hill,And still the demons of our pity spoke:No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;The telephone that rang before a ballEvery two minutes in Sorosa HallFor her would never ring; and, with a greatScreeching of tires on gravel, to the grateOut of the lacquered night, a white-scarfed beauWould never come for her; she’d never go,A dream of gauze and jasmine, to that dance.We sent her, though, to a chateau in France.

And she returned in tears, with new defeats,New miseries. On days when all the streetsOf College Town led to the game, she’d sitOn the library steps, and read or knit;Mostly alone she’d be, or with that niceFrail roommate, now a nun; and, once or twice,With a Korean boy who took my course.She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange forceOf character—as when she spent three nightsInvestigating certain sounds and lightsIn an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top,Spider, redips. And “powder” was “red wop.”She called you a didactic katydid.She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,It was a sign of pain. She’d criticizeFerociously our projects, and with eyesExpressionless sit on her tumbled bedSpreading her swollen feet, scratching her headWith psoriatic fingernails, and moan,Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.
As you can probably tell, I had a hard time deciding where to start and end that one. The whole second canto is pretty powerful, and really leaves you with a vision of how disconnected and sad some things can be.